Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Resources' recently tabled report of its inquiry into developing advanced manufacturing in Australia. As a member of the committee, I was especially pleased to participate in this very important inquiry and I want to thank the member for McEwen for his role as committee chair and for his support of the committee's purpose. I also want to thank the Minister for Industry and Science for tasking our committee with its significant terms of reference.

The findings of the committee have very strong relevance and resonance in my electorate of Calwell, with the development of advanced manufacturing in Australia particularly important for job creation in my electorate. With a loss of industry. with the likes of Ford and the associated supply chains, the revival of manufacturing is critical to ensuring that people in my electorate are positioned to meet the needs of today and tomorrow.

The report makes 10 sound and firm recommendations, designed to support manufacturers' access to suitable investment capital; to improve R&D commercialisation and industry research collaboration; as well as to address workforce and skill shortages. The committee supports the view that government should review policy options, including local preferential procurement strategies, to encourage and give confidence to Australian industry to invest in local manufacturing. A focus on local preferential procurement strategies, alongside industry confidence measures to encourage investment, building on the Buy Australian Plan, must drive tangible and enduring benefits to local jobs and local industry. The committee recommended that the government commits to establishing a series of significant government owned advanced manufacturing common user facilities in strategic locations as innovation precincts across Australia. This would allow for the scaling up of successful industry and capability development programs for Australian manufacturers.

In light of its rounded approach to the manufacturing process across the entire value chain, the report makes clear the need for the fabrication of a structural base of renewable energy technologies as an addition to just the components. This is particularly important to our local capability. As such, adoption would include in the case of wind towers, for example, the manufacture of blades, towers, bases and internal turbine components. In an era when countries around the world are scrambling in their bid for business and influence, new and emerging technologies, and the skills which drive advanced manufacturing, play a key role in an enormous global market that offers finance, jobs and opportunities to key sectors of our economy. Australia must be at the forefront of the rapidly-changing global economic landscape, where economic growth is directly connected to our capacity to match technologies with our workforce.

I want to pay tribute to industry and unions, which appeared before the committee and provided evidence helping to inform the work of the committee not as separate or competing interests but collaboratively as a force multiplier for the upward mobility of both workers and industry. This is what a sound, well-rounded sovereign manufacturing capability in Australia requires; it is what must drive advanced manufacturing here in Australia. If we are to bury our heads in the dichotomy of the past about advanced manufacturing and the defeatist and archaic attitude that resigns us to job losses, it will be very harmful to Australia's economic prospects. Not only is it not an inevitability, like some unwritten law, but it is, in fact, within our capacity to compete internationally and to drive economic growth.

This is very much about an Australia with job creation across the manufacturing sector, not job losses and industrial transfers away from Australia. What we need to reinforce is that advanced manufacturing is not merely about the machinery involved in the production process in factories; across Australia, advanced manufacturing serves as the basis on which we develop a highly skilled workforce that is at the centre of our nation's capacity to sustain a productive and innovative economy. This is the transformative role of shaping the upskill and reskill settings to meet our critical workforce needs. Through these we can build innovation in new and emerging technologies, we can build Australia's research and development capacity, and we can avoid the divergence of economic fortunes in society.

I look forward to seeing the recommendations contained in the report being accepted and adopted by the government—to them being made certain on the ground, both in policy and reality, and being translated into jobs and opportunities for workers and our economy within a sovereign, smart and sustainable manufacturing base in Australia.

House adjourned at 20:00